First-Person Shooters Clean Up IAA Awards

First person shooters Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, and The Orange Box took top honors at the 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards.

The 11th Annual Interative Achievement Awards have been announced at the 2008 Design Innovate Communicate Entertain (D.I.C.E) summit being held in Las Vegas, and this year first-person shooters took home the most prizes. Activision’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare won the Overall Game of the Year and Console Game of the Year awards, while EA & Valve’s The Orange Box took Best Computer Game and Outstanding Achievement in Game Design awards 2KGames’ Bioshock won Outstanding Achievement awards in Art Direction, Story Development, music, and sound design. All told, each title took home four awards, making a strong year for first-person shooter titles. But, notably, Microsoft’s much-anticipated and much-hyped juggernaut Halo 3 was shut out of all the prizes.

"The Interactive Achievement Awards is the forum for the industry’s best game makers to evaluate the merits of more than 160 titles submitted for consideration and honor the best in technical innovation and gameplay experience," said AIAS president Joseph Olin, in a statement. "This year’s winners truly represent the best cross section of interactive entertainment, demonstrating the power of next-generation platforms that have come of age."

Call of Duty 4 earned praise for its online multiplayer leveling system, while the "Portal" component of the five-game set The Orange Box received honors for game design, game play engineering, and character performance. Bioshock also set records by receiving a total of 12 nominations.